Taking the Pomodoro technique to its obvious conclusion

Posted by William Gallagher

The Pomodoro technique is where you set a timer and you work for, say, 25 minutes and then take a break for 5 minutes. Then you do it again. And again. The name Pomodoro comes, through a reasonably short but twisty route, from a type of clock or timer that was apparently popular somewhere. This timer looked like a tomato. And the word pomodoro means a kind of tomato sauce. Flash forward to the age of the app and we get this:

Looks more like a fella with green sunglasses if you ask me, but it’s a tomato timer for the Pomodoro Technique:

Pomodoro Timer helps you boost your productivity using the Pomodoro Technique™, one of the most effective time management methods out there. Not only will you get a fully configurable timer that lets you customize every aspect of the technique, but you will also enjoy a clear and beautiful user interface.

Pomodoro Timer costs £1.99 UK or $2.99 US and is available in the Mac App Store.

Final Draft storm

Posted by William Gallagher

Final Draft is the closest thing to an industry standard for film and television script writers: it’s a word processor that takes a lot of the repetitive formatting drudgery out of writing in this particular form. “Just add words” is the company’s strapline and most films you can think of the last very many years will have been written in Final Draft.

But.

You should see this software. For all its power, it looks ancient and I do very much believe that you’re going to be face to nose with an application for twelve hours a day, it would be good if you liked looking at it. If it just looked like it could do all you need. Then the company irked me beyond all reason with its iPad version. From my own book, The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition):

I like Final Draft but it lost a bucket of brownie points with me for Final Draft Reader: after years of everyone waiting for an iPad version of the app, they released that. More, they said it was because this was what we wanted. Sure, if you ask someone whether they’d like to be able to read their Final Draft scripts on their iPad, they’re going to say yes. Ask them if they’d prefer to be able to read and write them instead, you get exactly the same answer yet that yes is 100% different. That spin and some bugs in the first release put me off. But I do have it on my iPad and I do use it.

The Blank Screen: Word Processors – William Gallagher (UK edition, US edition)

I don’t use it very much. But then I don’t use Final Draft on my Mac all that much:

I do like it on my Mac. I turn to it to write scripts far faster than I ever do Pages or Word because it does make the job easier. If you don’t yet write scripts, you won’t yet get why that’s even possible. But, for instance, when you’re writing a very strong exchange of dialogue between two characters, it is a boon to be able to hit Return after one speech and immediately start the rejoinder and know that Final Draft will pop the right character names in for you.

I first bought a version of Final Draft a good fifteen years ago and I’ve probably only written twenty scripts in it – my Doctor Who work has to be delivered in Word so I tend to write it there or in Pages – but I stick with it because I have it and what I like about it, I like a lot.

I have version 8.something.or.other and the reason I’m telling you about this today is partly because version 9 is out. It’s partly because version 9 doesn’t add anything that makes me want to upgrade. And it’s mostly because Final Draft is getting a lot of criticism for not adding much, for being such an old-fashioned application, and for costing £154.99 (Amazon UK) and $178.68 (Amazon US). I’ve put Amazon links there rather than directly to FinalDraft.com because the savings are substantial: the US one is officially $299.99.

It’s specifically got a lot of criticism on Scriptnotes, a podcast co-hosted by Craig Mazin and screenwriter John August. He also develops a rival to Final Draft called Highland (£20.99 UK, $29.99 US in the Mac App Store but you can get a trial version if you go via the official Highland store). You would expect August to be critical of Final Draft: not so much because it’s a rival to his own software but because he developed that software to replace Final Draft in his own work. August wrote Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Choccolate Factory, Big Fish, the Charlie’s Angels movies and more. He should be the prime target audience for Final Draft but he and Mazin have been critical enough of it that Final Draft’s CEO Marc Madnick and product manager Joe Jarvis came on the podcast to discuss the software.

It did not go well.

Marc: Hey, we made a lot of bad decisions over the years. You live and learn. This is what running a business is. We’re 40 people. There’s not an office really in the world that has 40 people dedicated to one thing. And that’s screenwriting and screenwriting software. And, quite frankly, we listen every day. We service our customers. We listen every day. We love the good comments and we listen to the negative ones. Believe me, we take them to heart.

Craig: Do you think I’ve had any interesting or reasonable criticism for your product, or you think it’s all just a bunch of bunk?

Joe: I read every single podcast.

Craig: I’m not asking if you read it. I’m saying do you agree with me?

Joe: I want to absolutely know. Do I, well –

Marc: Sure, yes. Yes, some of your criticism is warranted.

Joe: I can’t think off the top of my head.

Marc: I don’t remember those. I remember the ones that aren’t warranted.

Craig: I think that’s weird. I would remember the ones that are warranted.

Marc: Hold up. This is our business.

Craig: Yes.

Marc: We know exactly, top to bottom, what the customers want, what they need, and we listen. You have to make business decisions on how you do it, when you do it, how you implement it, not implement it. It’s really what it’s all about. But we know. We’re engaged. And we understand. And we hear the criticisms. And some of your criticisms are warranted. And some of them are, I feel you might be misinformed.

Scriptnotes, Ep 129: The One with the Guys from Final Draft — Transcript

I am so impressed that this podcast has a transcript every week. I read it because listening was proving a bit painful. I don’t have Highland, I do have Final Draft, I’ve not listened to John August before, I have seen some of his films. The headline summary from this Scriptnotes was that the Final Draft people came across as not listening.

Craig: But I can now purchase an entire new software program for half the cost of what you’re charging for an update that has a few features thrown in. And that to me seems out of whack. That’s where I just say, look, I’m not saying that it’s right or wrong. The market doesn’t have right or wrong. It’s just a market.

Marc: You are in the minority. Fact.

Craig: Well, I’m in the minority now. But, I guess I’m just sort of surprised that you guys are sort of going, “And you’ll always be in the minority. We don’t see a problem. We don’t see any icebergs.”

Take a listen to the podcast here. It was actually recorded and aired in February but that episode caused enough of a flap that the next edition was about the storm it caused too. Then apparently another, different podcast took up the story and this week MacPowerUsers did too. That’s how I heard about it, I regularly listen to MPU.

So I heard about it there as MacPowerUsers interviewed John August – not just about this story – and then I went off down a rabbit hole of following the links and uncovering more. MPU linked to Scriptnotes linked to the next episode linked to the transcripts. It’s been a weird little storm took so long to reach my shore but now it’s here, I keep thinking about how Final Draft handled it and how the software itself feels like an embodiment of its makers. All software does yet you can’t always feel it as clearly as you do here.

The Scriptnotes podcast and many of the places that have followed made the analogy that Final Draft may be the QuarkXPress of its day. Quark was the page layout software that every magazine you’ve ever heard of used – until every magazine you’ve ever heard of switched to Adobe InDesign. That was partly because InDesign is just better but also Quark was fatally slow to respond and its responses were inadequate. It takes a lot to get people to switch away from a particular piece of software but once they’ve gone, you can’t get them back.

I’m not buying Final Draft 9. I haven’t regularly updated it, I think I skipped versions 6 and 7, for instance. So maybe I’ll be back for version 10. But it’s not as compelling or appealing as it once was.

Finally – work offline with Google Docs

Posted by William Gallagher

Previously on Google Docs and spreadsheets: you really had to be online to use them. There was a Google Drive app that let you work on this stuff in, say, your Dropbox account. But from today, you can get Google Docs and Google Sheets for iOS and work whenever you like.

I'm not a fan of Google Docs: I revise my opinion every time I see the price – it's free – yet I've found it clunky to use. And clunky to have online all the time.

This could change my mind – and I am shocked at you for making the connection that Microsoft Office for iPad just came out. Total coincidence.

Get Google Docs here and Google Sheets there. A presentation app is reportedly coming soon.

As ever, by the way, do go via these links to get the apps: going straight to the App Store and searching for them by name does not find them. Ridiculous and hopefully changing soon, but true.

LaunchCentre Pro masterclass on MacStories

Posted by William Gallagher

Imagine that you could have one button on your iPhone that, say, opens OmniFocus and goes straight to entering a new task. Or one button that dials your mother. Send a description of a meeting to Fantastical in one tap.

And then imagine that it’s faster to just go to OmniFocus yourself, or to tap on your mother’s name or to start typing directly in Fantastical.

That’s what happened to me. LaunchCentre Pro does all this one-button lark and it is very impressive but it takes two buttons. One to launch LaunchCentre Pro and then one to do the thing you want. As fast as it is, as clever as it is, that’s two taps and I was finding that it is quicker to things directly.

Consequently LaunchCentre Pro vanished off my home screen.

But it comes back each time there’s a new version and each time someone finds a vastly cleverer use for it than I ever came up with. Now, MacStories has come up with a more comprehensive guide to using this thing than even the makers do.

I know I sound down on LaunchCentre Pro but I like the idea and it is cycling round to my homescreen again. I do still keep Drafts on there, which is a text editor that has similar functions and that can work well with LaunchCentre Pro. So I may be down on it, but I’d like you to be up on it so you can see for yourself. Read this first and very comprehensive guide.

New: Clear To Do app adds Reminders

Posted by William Gallagher

This just in from Realmac:

…we’ve just launched a big (and much-requested) feature in Clear for Mac and iOS: reminders. With this great new feature, you’ll never forget a to-do – and as Clear syncs your tasks and reminders via iCloud you’ll be notified on all your Apple devices.

We’ve also got some new sound packs in Clear so you can customise the sounds as you complete tasks.

Clear with Reminders is of course a free update, and available on the App Store and Mac App Store.

Clear has always looked great yet not been powerful enough for me and in part that’s been because of the lack of reminders. Take a look at Realmac’s Clear website for a video of how this latest version works.

Stop trying new software

Posted by William Gallagher

Shudder. If it’s easier to be productive than it is to write anything – and, oh my lights, it is – then it is easier still to pretend to be even more productive by forever trying out new software tools. I am completely fine with this. If I hadn’t played, I mean, investigated, then I wouldn’t now be using OmniFocus and where would we be then? We wouldn’t be here: you and I, talking like this, it would not have happened if I hadn’t moved to using OmniFocus to get tasks done. That’s a scary thought. I knew that software was transformative, but I say this to you and I remember when I was first trying it out and I considered going back to my previous To Do manager.

That was a near miss.

Anyway.

I am definitely pro exploring and investigating. Except there’s this fella, Frank Chimero, who argues that enough is enough and I think he has a spectacular point:

Being an early adopter is exhilarating in the same way that riding a rollercoaster can feel like travel. You’re moving, but you’re not actually going anywhere, only devising ever-increasingly complex methods to make yourself feel slightly more barfy. You are in a loop de loop of productivity, changing for change’s sake. I made an agreement with myself in January: no new apps on my phone or computer. Don’t do new stuff. Just do your work.

Text editor, spreadsheet, email, pencil, paper, Photoshop. OK. That’s enough.

No New Tools – Frank Chimero

Is Chimero his real name? Seems wrong for someone saying you should stop where you are. But he means it and you see there where he says he made this agreement with himself in January. We’re now in May and he has things to say about how it’s going in the full article here.

Force your To Do app to have start dates

Posted by William Gallagher

Most To Do apps don’t have this but you need it and there’s a way to fake it on any software:

This is the ideal: you write one task and you give it both a start date – called “deferred until” in that screenshot – and a date that really have to do it by. All in one. (Actually, no, the ideal is to not use either start or end dates, especially not end dates. But that’s another story.)

There’s a good, solid, practical reason why this is the ideal when you have a deadline and there is a more nebulous yet enormously more important reason too. First, the practical one:

Having one task with start and end means you’ve one place to go change its details if you need

The nebulous one is:

Software that has start dates will keep your task hidden away from you until then.

It’s in your system, you won’t forget it, you just won’t have to consider it at all until the time you’ve said you should start.

Set it, forget it, get on with the stuff you have to do now.

I mean it when I say this is enormous. It’s the difference between a To Do list that you will use and one that just becomes this enormous long stupid hateful damn bloody list of a million things you still haven’t done yet, you total failure.

So it’s a shame that not every To Do app does start dates. My beloved OmniFocus does. (The screenshot above comes from OmniFocus for Mac where start dates are now called Defer Until dates. Apparently people got confused. But start dates are so crucial that the term is now burnt into me.) Other apps have it too: the online one Asana, the iPhone one Appigo To Do. It’s hard to give you a definitive list of what does and doesn’t have it because it changes a lot – and because some software firms look like they’ve only added start dates because customers wouldn’t stop shut up about them. The feature is there but, my lights, it’s hard to find.

You’d think you could just google like “omnifocus start date app review” or somesuch and get the answer for any app, but you simply can’t. Do try it. If you’re considering a particular To Do app, definitely google whether it has start dates. Be prepared to dig through articles. If the app is free, just get the bleedin’ app and try looking in that. But look for it, hope to find it, be prepared that you may not.

And if you don’t, fake it.

Do this:

Give your task a deadline, a due date, that is really the day you should start it
Call that task something like “Do that thing which is due on 1st May”
Create another task called “Do that thing” and give it a due date of 1st May or whatever the the real deadline is

It’s two tasks instead of one. And you may see both on your list every day, but typically your app will at least put them at the bottom of the list until the first deadline appears.

It works. It’s not elegant. There’s a strong chance that it’ll go wrong: if you tick the first one, the starting task, when you begin it but you don’t finish on that day, you have to remember to continue it tomorrow.

Have you noticed that I’ve avoided saying oh, to hell with it, just buy OmniFocus?

Bugger.

Let’s turn to the phones

Posted by William Gallagher

I swear to you that this is a thing. It really is. Just Google “iPhone home screen” and you will find literally half a dozen articles with people talking about what’s on their iPhone front page. I don’t think it’s such a big with Android users but then I wouldn’t be bothered looking. So. Maybe it’s Android too, maybe it’s everyone, maybe I’m not crazy. But I do have one thought about showing you my iPhone front screen.

Is there any better way of recommending software apps to you than showing what I actually use?

And since we’re talking about the front page, these must be the apps that I use the most. Yes. I use these to run my life. One caveat: I also have an iPad but that would be far too big a screengrab to show you. I also have a 27in iMac, but let’s be serious. You’d have to serialise a screengrab from that.

So here’s my iPhone and this is what it’s got on it that is practically worn out from the amount of use I put it all to:

Some of this stuff you know, some of it just does what it says underneath. Phone, for instance. Music. Let’s just wallop through the biggies:

Top row, second from the left – Fantastical 2 for iPhone. I’ve already talked about that and also Mynd, way down there toward the bottom, one up from Music, in Three Calendars, No Waiting. I was testing out Fantastical 2 then and also Mynd, which I’d only just realised is also a calendar. (I thought it was about meetings. It is. It’s just more.) Time has moved on and you can see that Fantastical 2 has kept its space on my home screen so I must like it. Whereas Mynd – wait, Mynd is still there. Bugger. It’s very good when it’s very good and when I need it but, oddly, I haven’t needed it much. Despite having many meetings. I’m afraid Mynd may be on its way out. I’ll think about it and get back to you. But Fantastical 2, unreserved recommendation: get it here.

Second row from the top, first on the left – Pocket. Read something here on the phone in Safari or in my RSS reader, or on my iPad, or my Mac or someone else’s PC, anything and anywhere, and I can lob it off to Pocket. Pocket is not the first Read It Later service, but it is the first that I used consistently often to save things and also to later remember that I had them and finally read the things. Pocket is free, by the way. Off you go.

Second row from the top, second on the left – OmniFocus 2 for iPhone. Need I say any more? Can I say any more? I can? Start reading here – and bring a mug of tea. Then go buy this version of OmniFocus for your iPhone. It’s been updated fairly recently and the iPad one hasn’t so I’m havering over whether to recommend that to you. Up to a couple of weeks ago I’d have said yes even though it’s not quite as whizzy as the iPhone one. The iPad version of OmniFocus has traditionally been the best of the three – but that third one, the Mac version, that’s zooming up. It used to be very hard to use, now a vastly easier yet still powerful one is in beta and I’m addicted to it. Right now, I think the Mac one is the best. Go to the Omni Group’s website and find out about all three.

Third row down, second from left – Drafts. I don’t use this remotely as much as I would expect and chiefly because that’s Evernote right next to it. I’ve now got muscle memory that if I want to write anything quickly, it goes in Evernote. Drafts is possibly a nicer writing experience and it is definitely more flexible. Anything you write in Evernote stays in Evernote and that’s great because it stays there in Evernote on your phone, your computer, your tablet and so on. Anything you write in Drafts stays in Drafts but with one tap can go almost anywhere else. Write something and send it from Drafts to OmniFocus or to a text message or to an email. Or, I’ve just this week found out, to Fantastical. I found it tricky to set up but now it works so smoothly that I wonder if it’s even working. All I definitely do with it at the moment is jot down ideas that it then automatically appends for me to a Story Ideas note in Evernote. Get Drafts here and Evernote there.

Fourth row down, first on the left – 1Password. Actually, see today’s The Blank Screen newsletter for more details of this and then go buy it while it’s on sale. If the sale is over by the time you catch this, go buy it anyway. I paid full price, I’m happy. And buy 1Password for iOS here.

Fourth row down, second from the left – Concise Oxford Dictionary. Not only the dictionary text but also an audio pronunciation guide for many words. Every word I’ve ever tried, actually, and I’ve had this app since about 2008. I use it a lot. I wish it were upgraded for iOS 7 or even just to the stretched out iPhone 5 that I use and I wish all sorts of things, but it’s a great dictionary. Unfortunately, it is sufficiently old that I don’t think you can get it anymore. You can get many similar versions but not quite the one I know, so I can’t recommend a particular one. But do have a look at them all, okay?

Fourth row down, third from the left – Awesome Clock. I use this as a bedside analogue clock. It’s very customisable but now I’ve found an arrangement of clock face and hands that I like, I like it a great deal. Unfortunately, it ain’t around. Not today, anyway. Vanished from the App Store.

Fourth row down, fourth from the left – XpenseTracker. That fourth row sees some action, doesn’t it? I use this for recording all my expenses. Are you okay? Did you just faint with surprise? Someone, bring us hot towels and some whisky. And tell me how much that costs because I need to pop it into XpenseTracker

Fifth row down, first from the left – HulloMail. I used to be on O2 and got Visual Voicemail. (Whereby instead of dialling in for your messages and listening to eight spam calls before you finally get to one from your client and, wait, hang on, she said a number there, bugger, where’s my pencil, you just tap. Here’s a list of the calls you’ve missed and which left messages. Tap on the one you want to hear first, you hear it first. Missed a phone number or couldn’t quite catch a word? Scrub back and forth through the recording.) It is so good that I had no idea there were iPhones that didn’t have it. Until I left O2 for 3 and despite in all other ways being far better, it didn’t have Visual Voicemail. HulloMail brings it back. It brings it back with ads and I keep meaning to upgrade but it’s a subscription and I’m not certain I use it enough. Take a look at HulloMail here.

Fifth row down, second from left – Where To? I keep wanting to call this Exit. Actually, I keep calling it Exit. And I rotate between using this and Localscope: both are easy of finding out what’s near you. I love this kind of app and I pummel mine: the first App Store review I ever wrote was for one called Vicinity and I could not get over what a stunningly great and useful idea this is. Where’s the nearest bank? Where’s a pizza place? Tap, there it is. With business details. I can’t remember why I fell away from Vicinity but I regularly bounce between Where To? and Localscope. Where To? looks very old to me and I just don’t enjoy using it as much as I do Localscope, but it’s given me more accurate information somehow. And I also understand it: I find I have to keep thinking with Localscope about where a certain feature is. But here’s Where To? and here’s Localscope: do have a look at both, would you?

Last one. Fifth row down, third from the left, Reeder 2 for iOS. This is my RSS reader of choice and I have done an awful lot of choosing. Here’s what I wrote about it when a new version came out late last year. There’s now also a Mac version in beta, which I enthused about here. But just go buy the iPhone version.

I’m worn out from enthusing.

My iPhone home screen, like everybody else’s I presume, changes a lot. You can see I’m havering over a couple of these apps. But the rest, the ones that stay there, tend to stay for the very good reason that they are very good. If you want a recommended app, this is what I recommend.

I hope you find they are as good for you as they have been for me.

US-only (for now): Refresh app briefs you on people

Posted by William Gallagher

New in the US App Store for iPhone, Refresh parses your calendar for the names of people you’re meeting and then compiles as much information about them as it can.

The information is gathered from social media sources in much the same way that you could and perhaps do yourself. Mynd does the same thing. But Refresh feels like it digs deeper and then it makes certain connections. Small but smart things: it will see, for instance, that someone’s Linkedin profile says they joined a company in 2010 but it will tell you they’ve “…been at Acme for nearly four years”. A tiny difference but one that more fits how we might think of someone or how we might phrase it if we opened a conversation with them.

That bothers me a touch. On the way in to a meeting, it’s working to prompt you with things you might need to know about folk. It feels a little bit icky and especially so when it directly suggests conversation-starting topics related to their previous employment, their holiday or whatever.

Personally, my only conversation-starter is “Hello”.

But I am ferociously interested in people. It’s exciting meeting someone new and up to that conversation prompt, Refresh is good. I like the name: it’s really refreshing my memory of whomever I’m meeting.

Any time you dig too deep or you make, I don’t know, intense briefing notes about their pet dogs just so you can appear matey or chummy in future, I am uncomfortable. Embarrassed. Yet when you meet a lot of people and they are all doing work that you really want to know more about, it’s not an awful idea to make the odd note.

Recently I’ve been adding just a line to the Notes field in my OS X Contacts. I might say what we’re working on together. There was one woman whose husband’s name would simply never stick in my mind so I did write that down.

Refresh wants you to do more and it prompts you to do so.

I got a push notification on my way out from a thing today and it’s still on my Notifications list as illustrated here in by far the most blurred-out screen grab I have ever taken.

I don’t like the line “What’s worth remembering about…” because the answer is EVERYTHING.

Still, if I wanted to, I could note that this fella was doing that work, this woman was doing that other work. And actually there was a fella today who is now doing a gig that he told me when we met back in November. If I’d made a note then, I might have remember to book a ticket in time.

So Refresh is very useful and it has some smart ideas that it has implemented well. I think it’s usefulness is directly tied in to how you think about people you meet and what you feel about briefing yourself this much.

It’s a free app so you can try it out very easily – but only if you have a US iTunes Store account. I asked the company and they confirm there will be an international release but there’s no date yet.

If you have a US account, you can find the Refresh app here. And whether you do to not, you can read more about it and the company on their official website.

You don’t have to be creepy about it

Posted by William Gallagher

But do your homework about people. I just had a terribly fun meeting with someone – er, I hope she enjoyed it as much as I did – and before I got to her, I'd read her blog. I'd seen her professional pages, I'd read what she did, I had an idea of some of the work she did.

I intended to stop there. The idea of coming to a meeting entirely cold makes me wince but equally I'm there to meet you, I'm not there to show off my deep research. I really want to meet you: easily the best part of journalism is that you get to bound off and say hello to people you might otherwise never come across. Utterly love that.

And I stopped intentionally looking into this woman's background. But I've been trying a free iPhone app called Mynd and it did some digging for me without my realising it.

Mynd is like a calendar assistant; I found it because I was exploring calendars and looking for why I nearly missed an appointment recently. I also found it because it got mentioned a few times by Katie Floyd on the Mac Power Users podcast. All it does, I thought, is show me my entire day in one screen: how many events I've got to get to, where the next one is, what the weather's like today. I also found that it calculates how long it's going to take me to drive to somewhere and it will say so right there on the screen: you need to leave in 10 minutes if you're going to make the appointment. Sometimes it sounds a notification too. I haven't figured out why it's only sometimes.

But I have figured out that it believes I drive everywhere when really it's more that I drive almost nowhere. So I got a Mynd notification that I ought to get out of Dodge and start the car right now when I was already on a train to London.

I was going to ditch it for doing that. I have Fantastical now that does all the work I need of managing my appointments and events. (Fantastical 2 for iPad is £6.99 UK, $9.99 US. Fantastical 2 for iPhone is £2.99 UK, $4.99 US. The iPad prices are launch offers and will shortly increase by about 33%.) Plus I don't care about the weather and when I do have a mind to wonder about whether it's going to rain, I ask Siri.

But.

There is a panel on this Mynd screen called People and up to now it has always been blank. Today it showed a photo of the woman I was meeting. And it got that photo from LinkedIn. When I tapped on that photo, it showed me her short LinkedIn bio and then it had options for calling her. If you're running late, you open Mynd, tap the person's photo, then tap to send her a message. If you've got the number of her mobile, anyway. Or an email address.

That would be spectacularly handy if I were ever late for anything but usually I'm cripplingly early. Still, it's impressive.

What was even more impressive is that I scrolled to tomorrow, saw the first meeting had a fella's photo there – and behind it was a list of related Evernote documents. It's just reminded me of the last note I made when talking to him. Right there. I'd forgotten I'd ever made a note but there it is.

It's like Mynd gives you a personal briefing before you go to meet someone. I don't think that means you should skip looking in to them yourself, but I feel wildly efficient about tomorrow now. And I won't feel wildly stupid if he mentions the topic of my last note.

Mynd is free for iPhone on the App Store. There's no iPad or Android version.

Have a look at the Mynd website too. It proposes using the software as your sole calendar for a week and I've just learnt that you can do that. Bugger. I think I'll continue using it as an adjunct to Fantastical but it's handy to know that all the ordinary calendar functions are in this Mynd app as well.